Sunday, October 25, 2009

I received a request to re-upload these compilations of unusual seasonal recodings (songpoems, celebrities, novelty, developmentally different, amateur, etc) again but it turns out some of the links are still live so I'll just repost those here..

Join Hugo, Woody, Conky, Hugo, Chip, Marcy, and many others for a selection of found and recovered video and cinema featuring ventriloquist dummies, marionettes, sock-puppets, Resusci-Annie, crash test dummies, and anything else we can scare up.

Featuring special live IN PERSON appearances by Los Angeles artist, musician & filmmaker Marnie Weber (Party Boys, Spirit Girls) presenting her new short film “The Sea of Silence” and David Liebe Hart and His Puppet Friends (Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show; Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) performing songs from a new original musical detailing the history of LA’s Pacific Electric Red Line!

The rest of the evening will be given over to a survey of ventriloquist dummies (and related simulacra) in popular culture, including excerpts from classic horror films “Dead of Night” and “Devil Doll” the “Conky” episode of Trailer Park Boys, and classic ventriloquist routines including a rare puppeteer-free video of Christian ventriloquy legend Little Marcy, and much more!

Sunday, October 18, 2009

No sooner had I put my audio sampler up on my under-construction website than I get an email from one Fielding M. McGehee III of The Jonestown Institute asking me about the track entitled Jonestown (white night/white noise mix) created primarily from electronically processed recordings of Rev Jim Jones. I had never heard of the Jonestown Institute, but tracked them down easily enough - it turns out "Mac" is the spouse of Rebecca Moore, whose two sisters - higher-ups in the Peoples Temple organization - died at Jonestown, and whose book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple was published by Praeger in March.

Their website is a huge and remarkable resource of information about Jones, Jonestown, and Peoples Temple, and they were very involved with the excellent documentary "Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple." So when Mac asked me to write a short blurb about the Jonestown (white night/white noise mix) track and for their annual online journal The Jonestown Report, I was flattered, and jumped at the chance. The piece was actually the soundtrack for a painting, as seen above, and one of many works that I've produced concerning the episode in Guyana. One of my early essays for Art issues. - entitled The Aesthetics of Paranoia - also dealt with the legacy of Jonestown, and conspiracy consciousness in general. The new edition of the Jonestown report is online now, and features an extensive section on the Peoples Temple LP He's Able. My short essay is here.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

"Even if you’ve heard of the Yes Men, “high profile” might seem a stretch for a pair of media hackers with a healthy Internet following and a moderately successful documentary to their names (or their pseudonyms). But just moments into their new film, The Yes Men Fix the World (previewing at the Hammer on October 21), you are jolted into a different perspective — as Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum nervously prepares to go live on BBC television in front of 300 million viewers, posing as a representative of Dow Chemicals, to announce long-overdue reparations to the victims of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984. Within a couple hours, Dow’s stock value had plunged $2 billion.

Fix the World documents several more of the group’s two-pronged subterfuge — taking exploitative commodification to logical extremes, grisly (Vivoleum — a new energy source) or ridiculous (the Halliburton Survivaball, an inflatable disaster-survival suit resembling a bloated tick); or using their mistaken identities to demonstrate the concrete possibility that corporations can “Dow the right thing.” Which is, of course, an impossibility. No matter what the Supreme Court says, corporations are not people, and they don’t have consciences. Recent findings indicate that corporations are, in fact, a malevolent, parasitical, conceptual organism from a nearby star system, bent on the destruction of the human body, mind and spirit. The hapless primates that organize themselves into corporate enclaves are helpless pawns — if only corporations didn’t dangle such shiny things just out of our reach!

Beneath the hilarity and satirical incisiveness of the Yes Men’s antics lurks an awareness of this reality. Audience reaction shots focus on bored lackies breaking out in relieved, conspiratorial grins. By the time New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin responds to the Yes-Men-as-HUD with a rambling allegory about “a well-dressed lie chasing the naked truth,” it seems like everyone’s in on the gag — they just don’t know how to get out. The best art is always about dislocation, whether it’s a picture of a bison on the wall of a cave or an upside-down urinal rejected by an avowedly unjuried art show."

Monday, October 5, 2009

I should be writing, but you gotta prioritize and when its a question of sharing a poop-walk photo of a reflected shopping-cart dude as the aorta of Jar Jar Binks, I think we all know what goes on the back burner.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Well, I thought I'd be blogging daily about the Stone Summer Theory Seminar, but there was no time, and then with the Viking wedding in Arcata and all and most of my pictures still on the laptop and back to teaching and art writing, you're all just going to have to wait to find out "What Do Artists Know?" In the meantime here are some shots from the roadtrip back from Arcata - about 14 hours straight.